“McLaren’s tale of a failing modern marriage and the individual journeys of her two flawed protagonists is a smart cautionary tale about what happens when all one’s wishes begin to come true. …McLaren’s patient, detailed narrative allows the reader to track their evolution intimately, and appreciate the changes they have wrought in themselves, and their marriage, and leave them with a hope of better things still to come.”
— RT Book Reviews
“A surprisingly beautiful novel. . . McLaren’s deft prose crackles.”
— The Globe and Mail
“Leah McLaren’s A Better Man is ruthless and heartwarming by turns, filled with characters who refuse to conform to expectations. McLaren digs into the disorienting, hilarious, and sometimes flat-out absurd negotiations of modern relationships and identities with a sharp eye and a sharper wit.”
— Grace O’Connell, award-winning author of Magnified World
Chapter 1
Nick
Nick Wakefield is a happily married man. That is the official story.
But even in this moment — a mild, unremarkable mid-week dawn in late September (a “school day,” as Maya would call it) — he is clinging to the enviable outward qualities of his life as if to bits of driftwood in a flash flood. It is, by any standard, a good life. A life of privilege and endless opportunities for pleasure. And yet it is also a life that has made him miserable. Slumped over the cool stone kitchen island in a pilled cashmere bathrobe (the perfect Christmas gift for “the dad who has everything”), Nick performs the early morning accounting he’s been labouring at each day upon waking for a couple of years now. A keeping up of appearances in his own head. Not a show of gratitude, exactly, but a listing off of the things that, if he could connect himself to the glittering hologram of his own success, he might well be grateful for.
These are the things he is sure other people would like to take from him, if they ever got the chance.
Topping the slate is this house, the one he’s sitting in now — a bombproof Edwardian boulder on a city street that his slick, post-adolescent realtor once described as the “filet of the neighbourhood” (a description Nick secretly relishes but would never have the bad taste to repeat out loud). Then there’s the lake house, a cube of glass and steel perched on a slab of pink granite two and a half hours north of the city. The view was chosen for its resemblance to a Group of Seven painting — rocks rising out of choppy waters, a couple of craggy, wind-battered pines emerging miraculously from cracks in the stone. He thinks of the place now and is filled not with pleasure but with the intense desire to buy the uninhabited island opposite. Always own your view, his late father — a workaholic, alcoholic dental surgeon — liked to say. It’s the single piece of wisdom he retained from the man, and he cleaves to it.
In and around these shelters — these properties that he owns, and that no one (not even the bank, since the Duracell job came through) has the power to take away from him — there is all manner of precious things. There are the cars, the boats, the collection of Danish teak mid-century modern furniture, the books and gadgets and photographs, and a few “pieces” by local “sculptors” he long since stopped pretending to understand or care about. There are his bikes, all six of them — two super-lightweight, carbon-framed French road racers in contrasting primary colours; a puffy-wheeled, shock-fitted mountain bike for a month-long race across Mongolia that he had to cancel at the last minute; a half-constructed, custom-built fixed-gear; and two bog-standard commuter bikes from his teens he hangs on to with the idea that he might one day revert to being the sort of modest fellow who cycles to work instead of sliding a luxury sedan into a private parking spot two feet from his office door.
There is more: The collection of copper cooking pots hanging above his head. The specially commissioned, modernist stone birdbath twisting into view like a lost Henry Moore. The empty coffee cup in his hand — white bone china and soothingly logo-free. Although he works in advertising — perhaps because of it — he has imposed a strict “no swag or overtly branded items” rule in the house.
A collection of objects — all of them expensive, solid and, most importantly, desirable — parade past his mind’s eye. As they do, he feels the old anxiety, that familiar hunted gut clench that wakes him before light most mornings now — eyes springing open, stomach lifting as, whoosh, the elevator drops — rising up before it recedes to the background, where it will stay all day like a threat.
Nick pours himself another cup of ethical sludge from the French press and glances at the oven clock: 7:00 a.m. on the dot. Right on cue, the pre-programmed kitchen radio warbles to life, a smug-voiced host analyzing the international misery of the day (“the Voices” is how he thinks of them, having never understood his wife’s obsession with public radio, some nerdy hangover of her academic childhood). The Voices are followed almost immediately by the sound of Maya’s bare feet moving across the bedroom floor to the master bathroom for her morning ablutions. She will dress in something stretchy and body-contoured — selected from her vast collection of expensive, sweat-wicking exercise togs — before giving the twins their breakfast and supplemental breastfeed (for the “natural antibodies”), dropping them at preschool and hitting the gym.
Nick will go to work and stay there as long as possible, as he has taken to doing for the past several months, ever since Maya settled the twins into a comfortable bedtime routine. It’s not that he is avoiding his family, exactly — just that his presence seems to disrupt some precarious balance it’s taken his wife sleepless months to perfect.
Maya did her best not to let on, but he could sense her bristling at his occasional (now infrequent to non-existent) attempts at New Man domesticity — an awkwardly loaded dishwasher here, a scalding bath there — and now he has given up.
There was a time when they had dinner together most nights, gently unwinding the day’s events over a bowl of pasta and a glass of wine, but this ritual has long since passed, surrendered to the necessary (no, enviable) chaos of buttered macaroni, bath toys and slobbered-on picture books — a chaos he copes with by keeping himself as scarce as possible.
“Daddy?”
A small, sticky hand tugs at his robe, causing it to fall open and exposing his genitals to a gust of cold air.
“Sweetheart, it’s rude to yank.” He says this with more impatience than he’d intended.
Isla pops a thumb in her rosebud mouth and, with her finger, loops a swirl of red-gold hair around her ear.
Her eyes — a clear, glittering blue, unlike his own murky hazel ones — crawl across his face. What are they looking for?
Nick reaches down and scoops his daughter onto his lap, but his vague hope that she might zone out quietly while he finishes reading the basketball box scores evaporates as Isla, snuffling with her first cold of the season, squirms around to look at him. It’s not that she wants down; it’s that she wants his full attention.
“Daddy?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“Foster sleeps with Garbage Truck and I sleep with Mermaid.”
“Is that so?”
“Yup.” She nods, mouth twisting. A square crust of snot has formed beneath her upturned nose like a fluorescent yellow Hitler moustache. “Garbage Truck is blue and Mermaid’s pink, with green scales for swimming and long hair. Foster’s a boy like you, Daddy, and I’m a girl. Like Mermaid. And Mommy.”
Nick nods and strokes the whole of his daughter’s head, a clumsy palm sweeping over a fragile corn-silk dome. Isla grins, suddenly pleased with herself. Then she sneezes — not once but twice, three times — spraying him with microbial bacteria. Nick winces, and resists pushing her off his lap.
“Girls are nice and boys are yucky. Exthept for Foster, ’cauth he’s my twin,” she says.
“No, sweetheart — ” Nick begins.
But Isla’s on a role. “Yeth, Daddy. Boys are yucky.”
“Why’s that?”
“They like killing games and ’splosions. And they don’t know how to love people.”
Nick struggles not to react. “Where’d you hear that, baby?”
“Foster tries to make me play with his stupid killing soldiers, but I hate them.”
“Not that bit, darling — the second part.”
Isla shrugs, pops her thumb back in her mouth, hops off her father’s lap and eyes him with something more innocent than suspicion and less affectionate than warmth. Nick wants to press further, but Foster is suddenly upon them, an agent of pure destruction. (Is there no object, Nick can’t help wondering, his son doesn’t yearn to pick up and hurl to the ground? No system of organization he doesn’t long to smash?) Cupboards fly open; pots are banged with wooden spoons; a brand new salad spinner spontaneously combusts, bits of plastic flying in every direction.
“Daddy, Daddy, check it!” Foster’s voice rings through the din. He’s a tall boy for his age, physically bolder and markedly less chatty than his sister. As the fey, French-braided ladies in his Montessori preschool often gently point out, Foster is “a bit of a handful.” He puts a pot on his head like a space helmet, bangs it with a spatula and laughs, delighted by this self-abuse. Noticing his bareheaded sister, he picks up a glass salad bowl and, before Nick can stop him, overturns it on top of her, causing the thing to slip to the floor and shatter, whacking Isla’s forehead in the process. The girl is the first to erupt in a squall of hot tears, followed by her brother in a reciprocal howl. (Nick never ceases to be amazed by the way the twins can switch from adversity to unity, hostility to empathy, at a moment’s notice.)
And of course, it’s at precisely this moment, with Nick standing helpless in the shrieking chaos, that Maya chooses to enter the kitchen.
Even now he registers that she’s beautiful. Tall, thin-wristed and pale-lashed — she used to joke that without mascara she had no eyes, and she still never emerges from the bathroom without a slick of it. From the beginning, Nick preferred her without — there was a time he felt possessive of her naked eyes, with their translucent, underwater lids. Now he avoids them.
“Foster, apologize to your sister,” Maya says, herding the twins out of range of the mess. Without glancing at Nick, who’s still standing uselessly by the sidelines, she squats down in her leggings like a rice-paddy worker and scoops the shards of the shattered bowl into the dustpan that has somehow magically appeared in her hand. Isla allows herself to be kissed better, first by her mother, then by her brother. Appeased, she moves toward Nick to complete the circle of comfort. The combination of virus and crying jag has left her face covered in a film of fresh mucus. Nick pulls back on his barstool and grabs a hemp-cloth hanky from a drawer, then attempts to persuade Isla to blow her nose by wrapping the cloth clumsily around her face.
“Blow out, sweetheart,” he says hopelessly. The harder he tries, the more she snorts and snuffles, snot plugging all her orifices. Her face is red and scrunched, working itself up to a howl. He can hear the wet congestion in her head as she gulps for breath, and finally — in abject defeat — he allows himself to look to his wife, who has been watching the scene unfold. Maya doesn’t look back. She crouches down, takes her daughter’s face in her hands, places her mouth over Isla’s tiny nose and proceeds to suck out the contents of her daughter’s sinuses before spitting it out into the sink.
Nick looks back at the paper. This habit of his wife’s — like the extended breastfeeding and the “family bed,” which he has long since vacated for the guest room — is part of her firmly held philosophy of child-centred parenting. Since leaving her partner-track position as a divorce lawyer at one of the city’s biggest firms, Maya has funnelled all her intellectual and physical energy into moulding and nurturing the twins, making sure they “attached” properly — though to what, exactly, Nick’s never been entirely sure. On the few occasions he’d questioned her methods, there’d been an onslaught of disconcerting counter-arguments involving terms like “socio-emotional development” and “hopelessly outdated paternalism.” Now Nick’s passive resistance is simply assumed.
Maya starts pulling things out of the pantry: dried beans, pumpkin seeds, a bag of leathery kale, apples, some sort of unidentifiable ancient grain product. Supplies that will somehow be turned into edible compost squares, pressed into Tupperware and taken to post-preschool play dates in lieu of “bad snacks” full of trans fats, refined sugar and cancer. Nick observes this chore with the disinterest of a barfly watching a highlights reel on a barroom TV screen — as if he’s seen it all before but is too tired to pay the bill and leave.
Finally he blinks himself back into the moment. “How was your sleep?” is all he can think to say.
Maya finishes removing the organic stickers from half a dozen Fuji apples before looking up. “Okay,” she says. Then she adds, “Actually, I had a weird dream and couldn’t get back to sleep.”
He knows he ought to ask what it was about, but for some reason he can’t bring himself to do so. Does anyone actually care about someone else’s dreams? Aren’t they a bit like other people’s children? Or minor health ailments?
“Oh, yeah?”
She draws a small but mindful breath. “We were back in university and there was a huge event happening on campus — maybe it was homecoming weekend? I had your varsity jacket, but I couldn’t find you anywhere. And then I remembered you were writing a philosophy exam and I was meant to be there too because we’d studied together, so I started running through the halls looking for you. But when I got to the right classroom, the professor stopped me at the door and wouldn’t let me in because I wasn’t wearing any bottoms — ”
“Pants?” Nick asks.
“No, bottoms. Period. I was naked from the waist down.”
Maya coughs and keeps talking, and Nick nods and nods, eyes drifting to the box scores until a subtle vibration steals his attention. Even with the phone face down on the counter and turned away from him, his finely tuned antennae home in on that delectable possibility, the promise of all information, his mental lifeline to the outside world: an unknown text-message-in-waiting. Now Maya is in full flow (something about her teeth falling out and a baby lost in the football bleachers), and he’s scrolling and scrolling until he becomes conscious of a tonal change. This comes in the form of the sharp, unfamiliar sound of her using his name.
“Nick?” she is saying. “Are you even going to pretend to be present?” He thinks this is what she says, but in truth he can’t be entirely sure.
“Sorry, babe.” He gives her a kiss on the cheek, toward her ear, as far away from her mouth as possible. “Big client meeting today. Gotta run.” And he runs upstairs to shower, shave and dress.
In the car, before setting out for the commute downtown, he reads the rest of the text message. Hey, sailor, when you gonna buy me lunch? It’s from Shelley, the caterer he’d met on set last week, with the ginger bob and the small but promising breasts. His spot for the new music channel had just been nominated for an industry award, so he’d figured he’d reward himself with Shelley’s number. Since then they’ve been exchanging several texts a day, sometimes back and forth at a rapid-fire pace, making up nicknames for each other (“sailor” is new — he isn’t sure he approves), sarcastically bantering and generally building up sexual tension like a couple of semi-literate teenagers. She isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, this Shelley, but Nick has decided he likes honing his seduction skills on a pretty girl who is more attractive, yet markedly less clever, than him. He considers it a form of harmless recreation. He is merely exercising the muscle, keeping himself fit in the evolutionary, rather than practical, sense. It’s not that he intends to have an affair (he’s told himself they’ll never actually meet up, and if they do nothing will happen, and if it does it’ll be no more than a kiss), more that he likes to keep himself in fighting form. The libido is life force, and Nick intends to keep his stimulated for purposes of professional prowess, rather than tawdry sex. Success is provision. In this sense, when he thinks about it very carefully, he is actually sexting for the sake of his family.
He writes, Aren’t you being a bit demanding, little miss? Where are your manners? There, that would throw her off balance. He smiles, reads the message over once and presses Send.
Backing the car out of the driveway, Nick glances up and sees Maya in the window, half-hidden by the curtains, an apparition of herself. She is watching him from the room that used to be their bedroom. The bedroom she now shares with the twins. When their eyes meet, she shrinks back behind the gauze and is gone.
Chapter 2
Maya
Maya is sprawled on the master bed, breastfeeding Foster and reading The Way: Ten Rules for Seeking Out a Truth Worth Living. The book, which she drove across town to buy at an independent bookstore, was recommended to her by her personal trainer and life coach, Bradley. Maya knows it’s basically crap. She also knows she’ll read it right to the end in spite of this. While she normally steers clear of commercial bestsellers, self-help and anything with an embossed cover — she majored in English and can recognize a split infinitive when she sees one — there was something about the manner in which Bradley recommended The Way that seduced her. “I think you’d really vibe off it,” he’d said, placing a large supportive palm on her forearm for emphasis and really looking at her, almost into her, she thought. What was remarkable was not just that she experienced this connection, but that she felt it in spite of his use of “vibe” as a verb. His palm was hot but dry, not moist or slippery in the least. If it had been, she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t have bought the book, let alone read it. So has she found the promised “ecstatic truth of existence” in its pages? Not yet, but she still has 487 pages to go. She’s just finished the introduction, with its breathless blather of string theory and “the law of truth” — an apparently overlooked rule of physics stating that if you speak your heart’s honest desire, out loud and often, “the universe will invariably answer.” Maya is considering the empirical authenticity of such a law when Foster bites her — a sharp nip with his milk teeth that makes her flip upright, stabbed through by a metal bolt.
“Motherfucker!” She pushes her son’s sturdy shoulders away from her chest and watches as his head comes away last, the suction of mouth on nipple breaking with a pop, his head snapping back. On her areola there is black bead of blood; she wipes it off with her thumb and licks it, tasting the sweet, milky mixture of two vital fluids. Foster stares past her, lazy-lashed and drunk on oxytocin, oblivious to her pain. She mops up her breast before tucking it back into the nursing bra. There is no point in scolding him, she knows. Praise the good, ignore the bad. It’s her own fault for not being able to stop. Every week she promises herself that next week she’ll wean them for good, but then Monday rolls around and with it the moody morning vicissitudes, the restlessness of bedtime, and she reverts back to the old way. She can feel Nick’s silent disapproval mounting with each week the breastfeeding goes on. She knows what he thinks: that she’s doing it for her own selfish, needy reasons rather than for the twins’ well-being. The truth is, three years after their birth (a botched homebirth turned emergency C-section overseen by a disapproving doula and a team of unflappable thirty-year-old female surgeons), she still finds it hard to pinpoint where she ends and her children begin. She knows people think it’s strange — possibly even disgusting — this business of nursing one’s children well past the infant stage. But what about the importance of unconditional love? What about the foundations of security such closeness can bring? What of the natural immunity? Maya wouldn’t tell a soul, but a deep-seated part of her believes that she is protecting her children with her breast milk.
And that without this magic elixir, intimately administered in the ancient way — skin on skin, nipple to mouth — something awful might happen. Madness, illness, destruction, even death … And so she persists.
Now that Foster’s finished, Isla, who’s been looking at a gender-neutral picture book about dinosaurs, swivels across the bed for her turn. Maya reflects for the zillionth time on how amazing it is that they never refuse it, no matter how much dairy and processed breakfast gluten (she’s trying to get them off oatmeal and onto quinoa porridge, to little avail) they clog themselves with first. No matter what, the primordial thirst wins out. Surely they will lose their taste for it eventually, but when will that be? Five? Ten? Fifteen years? Could mammals actually lactate that long without having more offspring?
Maya knows such things don’t realistically bear thinking about, but she’s also secretly pleased with her ability to turn mothering into a kind of endurance sport.
Where other mothers detach, she persists — the contours of her existence blurring into her children’s development so that all their previous selves, from infancy to kidhood, are imprinted on her skin, a burgeoning palimpsest in bodily fluids.
Isla’s on her lap now, head nuzzling under Maya’s collarbone, on the spot where she once slept as a baby. (Can she remember this in some subconscious recess of her brain?) She draws her knees up to her chest and wriggles into the fleshy curve of her mother’s hips, snuggling down like a baby kangaroo in her pouch. Before Maya even has a chance to unhook, Isla’s hand has snuck inside her top. She looks up, face full of trust and wonder, and opens her lips to whisper something. Maya leans in to hear her daughter’s secret and decides that this — above all else — is the reason she persists. Yes, it must be.
“Mommy?” says Isla.
“Yes, honey?”
“Motherfucker.” And she latches on for her morning drink.
When in doubt, seek professional help. This is one of Maya’s core beliefs — one of the few she still seems to share with her husband. For every problem, there is a person whose job is to solve it. She believes this fervently, and yet there is the nagging fear that her mother — a bread-baking retired academic — might be right. That if she keeps on outsourcing more and more efficiently, eventually she will become a tiny bit player in her own life, with all the lead roles taken by talented, competent professionals.
She would be lost without Velma, who comes ten hours a day, five days a week, forty-eight weeks of the year (the remainder a paid holiday). Officially Velma is the twins’ nanny, but in reality she’s also the family cleaner, cook, gardener, handywoman, finder of lost remotes and socks and keys, putter-together-of-Ikea-furniture, writer of thank-you notes, jump-starter of cars, spiritual counsellor, massage therapist, gadget IT support and, if Maya is honest with herself, the other human adult she talks to most.
Each morning, when the twins are at preschool and Maya has returned from the gym, Velma makes a pot of tea and they convene in the kitchen for girl talk. They would never call it that, of course. Officially, they are employer and employee, mistress and servant, lady-of-the-house and lady-in-waiting. But their chit-chat allows them both to forget this arrangement and act like something less awkward and old-fashioned is going on. For Maya, these bonding sessions assuage her guilt at engaging someone else to hand-wash her delicates despite being unemployed herself. For Velma, a twice-divorced former Brazilian pageant contestant (runner-up, Miss Curitiba 1978) now in her late fifties, it’s just a welcome distraction while she gets on with the daily business of sterilizing the counter, reorganizing the fridge and cleaning the corners of the window ledge with a Q-tip. From the cuffs of her tight white jeans to the points of her gel-manicured fingertips, Velma is a superior human being in every way.
Ever since Velma bustled into their lives three years ago, hoisting a bottle sterilizer and case of Diet Coke against her broad and perfumed bosom, Maya’s household had ceased to be within her own control. One tearful post-partum call to an upmarket childcare agency was all it took to produce this splendidly tanned and cheaply Botoxed Mary Poppins busting out of an emerald sateen blouse.
After casting a spell over the writhing, colicky twins (Velma’s method included the ministration of ominous-looking herbal tinctures, some open-handed back-thwacking and swaddling that resembled a straitjacket), she set to work on sorting out the house and, finally, Maya herself. While Velma has succeeded in alphabetizing the spice rack, dry-cleaning the curtains, washing the walls and ridding the pillows of dust mites, her campaign to get Maya to “do something with that hair” and put on a little weight “for the sake of your face” has not been nearly as successful.
Despite this, their domestic companionship has taken on a comfortable rhythm, with Velma running the show while Maya watches gratefully from the sidelines, calling the occasional cue like a well-intentioned but unnecessary stage manager in a long-running Broadway musical. The unflinching competence with which Velma attacks the chaos of a post-breakfast kitchen or soothes a crying toddler is enough to make Maya despair at her own lack of firm domestic instinct. Like all great mistresses of the domestic arts, Velma manages to be bossy and loving by turns. “Watch! Like this!” Velma is always saying, while swabbing gravel from a scraped knee, suctioning water from a toddler’s ear or turning over a perfect tarte Tatin. “You see? Easy-peasy.” But for Maya, it never feels that way.
For Maya, domestic perfection is a daily battle. For Velma, it’s a vocation.
In between the cleaning and cooking and childcare, they talk about stuff: Velma’s daughters (now twenty-seven and thirty — one a plastic surgeon in Rio and the other a fashion buyer for a major downtown department store), their respective childhoods, places they’ve lived, holidays they’ve taken, grooming secrets, cooking tips, celebrity gossip, high-profile murder trials, political sex scandals. But mostly they revert to their favourite subject, which is the twins.
“You should have seen Foster at the playground yesterday,” says Velma while polishing the good crystal wine glasses using the espresso machine steamer — something Maya would never have thought of in a million years. “Strutting around like he owned the place. At one point he actually went over to the gate and started choosing which children can come in and which ones he doesn’t like the look of. Such a healthy little ego on that boy.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t have sociopathic tendencies,” says Maya. “You haven’t noticed him killing any stray cats have you?”
Velma’s laugh is a pealing church bell. “Oh, honey, you don’t have to worry about that. He’s going to be wonderful. He’s very proud but also very sensitive and full of heart. Remember the time he knocked Isla off her trike and then tried to take off his Band-Aid to put over her bloody nose? That was so sweet. Come to think of it, he reminds me of my second ex-husband.”
“What was he like?” Maya is intrigued. While Velma devotes plenty of airtime to her two daughters, she rarely mentions either of her ex-husbands, both of whom are back in Rio.
“Oh, so handsome. A handsome devil — a salesman who could charm the pants off an Eskimo.” Velma is the queen of the mixed metaphor.
“How long were you with him?”
“Only two years. He was a madman — no offence to Foster — but it was worth it because the crazy attraction I felt for him gave me the courage to leave my first marriage. You know that one lasted a long time. Over ten years. Much longer than it should have.”
“Why?”
Velma shrugs, then gives the crystal glass another blast of hot steam. “I dunno. Why does anything need to end? I suppose I got a bit” — she jiggles her shoulders this way and that, causing her mane of frosted-tips to quiver around her face — “I guess you would call it restless. I had to run. To dance. To get a new life! Looking back I’ve never questioned it. If I hadn’t left him, I wouldn’t be standing here today.” She spreads her arms, still holding the tea towel with a generous smile.
“But your first husband, you were with him so long. You must have met him very young. He is the father of your children, isn’t he?” Maya hears a note of urgency creep into her voice.
Velma looks confused. “Yes? So? People change. Carlos was a good man, but in the end I was so terribly bored. I had to get out or die. And I did, and here I am.”
A fizzing wave of anxiety washes over Maya. This is not about you, silly, she tells herself. She looks down, blinking and stretching her face at the marble chopping block, but it’s no use. The tears have been lurking just below the surface lately, welling up and seeping out whenever she’s reminded of the happy past — back when she and Nick could bear to look each other in the eye. Earlier today, after feeding the twins, she spent ten minutes sitting in a chair, attempting to channel the Law of Wanting — a fanciful notion she’d just read about in The Way. The idea is to concentrate on the thing you want most, and the universe will hear you and grant your wish. I want my husband to love me again, she’d thought over and over, like a mantra. But the wanting only served to remind her of the loss.
It wasn’t that she wanted love so much as she couldn’t figure out where it had gone.
Velma registers the tears and rushes to put her arms around her. “What’s the matter? Oh, Lord, what stupid idiot thing did I say? Tell me and I’ll chew up my words!” She mimes plucking words from the air and shoving them into her mouth and swallowing.
Maya laughs and wipes her nose with the cuff of her yoga jacket. “It’s nothing, really. It’s just … sometimes I think Nick feels about me the way you feel about Carlos. It’s like I’m just there. A fixture he’s getting increasingly sick of. Like, like” — she looks around the kitchen, searching for a metaphor — “like an old backsplash.”
Velma raises an eyebrow. “A what?”
“You know, a backsplash. The tiles that go on the wall over the counter. People always change them when they renovate. That was the first thing Nick changed when we bought this house. The old terracotta backsplash — unacceptably 1990s, he said. He wanted European subway tiles. The point is, an updated backsplash gives an old kitchen new life.” Her voice snags in her throat mid-sob. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m sorry.”
Velma hands her a hanky, and instead of wiping, Maya pats at her face the way her dermatologist taught her, then snuffles like a congested pug.
“But why do you assume you’re the backsplash and not the kitchen?” asks Velma.
“What do you mean?” Maya begins to wonder if this metaphor hasn’t run its course.
“Well, you assume you’re the old backsplash, but maybe you’re the old kitchen and all you need is a new backsplash to update your look. Or maybe your marriage is the old kitchen and the two of you can get a new backsplash together and then everything will be fine.”
Maya knows she needs to be careful.
Apart from the odd eye-rolling joke, she hasn’t let Velma in on the hole in the centre of her marriage.
In part this is because she doesn’t quite know how to articulate what’s wrong.
She and Nick almost never fight, yet their mutual dissatisfaction is palpable in countless unspoken ways. Maya is suddenly overcome by the unbearable fatigue of long-term denial. She wants to tell someone — anyone, really, but Velma especially — how unhappy she is. But she knows she shouldn’t. This house — this family — is also Velma’s livelihood. She’s as protective of it as Maya is, maybe more so.
“Oh, it’s fine, really. Things have just been a bit strained lately. Nick’s been working so much and I’ve been focused on the kids.”
Velma uncrosses her arms and places a hand on each hip. “And your sex life?” she says.
Maya cringes. She’s always resented the notion that sexual relations could constitute an entire parallel life outside of regular existence. No one asked you about your “eating life” or your “exercise life” or your “sleeping life” or your “job life,” so why should sex be any different?
“What about it?”
“Are you doing it? Regularly? Or have you fallen off the horse?”
Maya can’t meet Velma’s eyes. Her tongue is mossy from too much green tea.
“I think it began to tail off around the time we started co-sleeping.”
“You mean after you had the babies?”
“More or less. I mean, yes.”
Velma nods, hands on hips. “I know what you need. I read about this in one of those silly magazines, but in this case it’s actually a very good idea. It’s called the ‘date night.’ You put on a nice dress, drink a few cocktails, talk about something other than the kids. In my day we did that every weekend. Then again, when my girls were the twins’ age I was in my twenties and living with my husband’s entire family.”
Maya grimaces. “It’s true we never go out anymore. I mean, there’s his annual awards gala, the whatever-they’re-calleds, but I didn’t go this year.”
“Why not?”
“Isla had a cold. Remember that awful hacking cough she had last winter?”
“And what? You had to watch her while she sniffled in her sleep? I couldn’t do that for you?”
“No! She was just being, you know, a bit weepy and clingy, and I felt she needed to know that I was there, otherwise her foundation of trust might be eroded or … oh, I don’t know. Okay, the truth is I just didn’t feel like going.”
“And why didn’t you feel like going?” Velma lifts up the elements and scrubs some grease off the stovetop. She stares hard at Maya, indicating she will tolerate nothing less than the truth. Maya feels herself shrink in deference.
“I guess I haven’t had much use for parties — or date nights, for that matter — since the twins were born. It all just seems so superficial when there are two small lives I’m now responsible for. Well, we are.” She smiles sheepishly at Velma.
Velma rolls her eyes with dramatic disapproval. “You’re kidding me, honey. Seriously?”
Maya blinks, then blows a wisp of hair from her face. She knows what Velma is going to say without her needing to say it — that the twins are three years old and well taken care of, so why would it be risking their lives to go out and have some fun once in a while? And even more to the point, that it’s not in anyone’s best interests to sacrifice her relationship with Nick to assuage some deep-seated reptilian fear that if she leaves her children for more than a couple of hours at a time, they will end up corrupted, maimed or buried in an avalanche of refined sugar. She knows all this, and yet she finds it hard to override the anxious primal urges that brought her to this juncture in the first place.
“Have you tried talking to Nick?”
“About what?”
“About this feeling you have — that he doesn’t love you the same way anymore?”
Velma says this matter-of-factly, but it still manages to take Maya’s breath away.
She shakes her head. “We never talk about our feelings,” she says weakly. “But at least we don’t really fight. There’s got to be some good in that.”
Velma looks unconvinced. “See, that’s just where you’re wrong. A little fighting is good for a marriage. Back home everybody says, ‘When you fight, you fuck.’ Is true, no?”
Maya looks down at her hands. She has heard this theory before.
“Maybe that’s what you’re missing — the howyoucallit?” Velma plucks an elastic band off the counter and extends it back, letting it snap against her fingers.
“Tension?”
“Yes, the tension! Exactly. This is what holds couples together. Like the sun and the moon.”
“You think?” Maya wouldn’t begin to know how to pick a fight with her husband, even if she wanted to — or this is what she tells herself, conveniently ignoring the adversarial side of her brain, the side she set adrift when she left the law. The fact is, while she and Nick have almost no conflict to speak of, the resentment between them is constant and palpable — it just doesn’t lead anywhere. Not to a fight and not to sex.
Their marriage, these days, feels like a state of dull discomfort. A pain so familiar that it wears on her like a chronic injury — too unpleasant to ignore, too boring to mention.
For a moment Maya wonders if it’s her fault for not demanding more of her husband. For not calling him at work and ordering him to get home early or bickering over laundry and blown light bulbs. She read a self-help book once about how men prefer bitchy women because their selfish behaviour is a subconscious indicator of self-worth, which men in turn interpret as objective value in a mate. For a while after that, she tried to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. But her heart wasn’t in it. She liked to think of herself as bloody-minded and tough, but in truth, she was in her own life acquiescent and deferential to the point of absurdity. Why else had she failed to wean her babies after three years? Because they kept asking for “mommy milk.” Why else had she potty-trained them by eighteen months? Because a book told her that’s what good mothers do and she was determined to do things by the book. Another ludicrous case in point: here she was taking marital advice from Velma, a two-time divorcee and avowed singleton (she often said she’d be damned if she ever “washed anyone else’s socks again without being paid for it,” which Maya thought was eminently sensible).
“You should pick a fight with him and see what happens,” Velma concludes, folding and refolding her dishcloth as if to say, That settles it.
“If you think so,” Maya almost whispers, knowing that she won’t.
Excerpted from A Better Man by Leah McLaren, published by Grand Central Publishing. Copyright ©2015 Leah McLaren.
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